The tape industry should stop making excuses and instead raise its head with pride. Tape is great for archiving and nothing else comes close. In fact the gap with disk competition is going to widen in tape's favour.
This was the gist of senior ESG analyst Mark Peters' message at Tape Summit in San Francisco, during which a …

Re: Lifetime?

The biggest problem with the theory of a '30year lifetime' is that you F! can't get hold of a drive that survives for more than 5 years these days.

I just need 10year lifetime, but I really hope no one ever comes asking if I can restore something from a 10year old DLT tape as I doubt we have a single one of those still working, or a server it can be connected to... (Not that many SCSI-II connectors on a modern Blade system... )

Re: Lifetime?

re: DLT recovery - If interfaces are a problem you can use an old SCSI->FC bridge. You'd be surprised by how durable tape drives actually are. I work at a company that specialises in recovering old backups and we have a few DLT7000 drives which still work fine. The main issue is the header strip and sourcing them.

Re: I refute your comparison

As someone who sells and implement massive disk based solutions, you should be aware you don't use scsi or sas drives for the backup target, you use large, cheap drive in a raid for both the on site and off site locations. If you are using scsi or sas drives you are doing it wrong.

We currently deploy arrays consisting of however many 2TB 7500 RPM drives they need at the rate of 2.5x the data they could store, with a few a decent raid controller to manage them.

Our off site location is a blackblaze box array, and uses some proprietary software to further distribute the data between them, making it redundant at the physical destination level as well.

Still cheaper to implement than tape, and we charge $.50/gig for our off site fees, along with a $75/mo software license (they do not purchase the software used to backup, just the on site hardware)

Re: rusty?

Re: Tendberg?

I've never liked motorized eject... Too much that can (and will) go wrong...

Unfortunately, it's necessary if you want a tape library.

(Unless you build a 'side-loaded' SLR where you just place the front of the tape up against the drive. That's the nice thing ablut SLRs, you never pulled the tape out of the cartridge, or even 'engaged' with cogs or axles to drive the spools.)

On todays drives it's impossible to do a mechanical eject, which means you usually have to partially disassemble the drive to remove a tape when the drive dies and you need to send it in. (I'm NOT giving anyone MY tapes!)

Long live tape!

The big disk vendors (especially those who also sell backup software) have been saying tape is dead for ages - I wonder why?

Every customer I talk to wants to reduce their reliance on tape and has a desire to remove it completely but I know of very few outside the SME space who have been able to.

The main problem with tape is restore speeds and reliability of media and drives - contrary to popular belief if you get the right data set pushed to a tape library it will outperform all but the fastest and most expensive disk systems which few customers will consider using for backups. The big problem area in tape backup is unstructured data but technology can help alleviate that or do the first backup to disk and then either keep on disk for a desired period or move it off to tape when there is more time to do so. If a customer can get to a point where most of their restores are coming from disk it takes away the main problems associated with tape which is what most customers do.

For those who need to keep data for less than ~3 years disk is viable for most but once you go over ~3 years or the data volumes are huge then disk is still too expensive regardless of compression or deduplication or what the disk vendors may say.

If you want to take away my Memorex silo ...

Fud-a-licious

And as usual the marketing folk completely disregard operational necessity in terms of restores which lets face it is the fundamental function of backup. Tape is for archiving and does that job well enough. However tape is utterly kack if you need to do a db restore ‘on the fly’ or recover single files when compared to disk. This is especially ture if the business relies on high data availability.

So then we come to the article and imagine my surprise that there is much blowing of the tape trumpet at a jolly for the tape industry. My surprise was utterly complete because I would never have imagined that fud would be so prevalent at an industry shindig.

Tape Pride

Tape still looks obsolete and too expensive, even with the hard disk price blip.

ZFS RAID5+N makes the 'better error rate' on tape irrelevant, given ZFS protects from and detects full end-to-end hardware and media data corruption, something which tape can't do. ZFS supports multiple live Dataset snapshots which don't waste time, storage space or requiring incremental backup software like tape does, and possibly no down-time for backups, so beats Tape for timeliness too.

If you have at least two ZFS RAID5+N NAS boxes, for replication, Tape becomes a completely pointless waste of money unless you genuinely have space issues for powered-off RAID array storage and can afford the higher costs of tape backup.